Sister Roma | |
|---|---|
 Sister Roma in 2021 | |
| Born | Michael Williams [1] December 22, 1962 |
Michael Williams, (born December 22, 1962), known professionally as Sister Roma, is an American drag queen activist, gay pornography director, fundraiser, entertainer and event host/emcee. He has been a member of San Francisco's Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence since 1987. [2]
Roma was the long-time art director at gay pornography studio Hot House Entertainment until Hot House was bought by NakedSword, in 2014; he now serves as "art director and overall Ambassador of NakedSword". [3] Roma also co-hosts an online talk show, The Tim and Roma Show, that focuses on gay pornographic movies and the LGBT community. Roma has been a presenter at the GayVN Awards, a pornography industry awards show. [4] Roma has served as an emcee and judge for the San Francisco Drag King Contest, [5] the 2005 benefit Porn Idol; [6] and at the BDSM/leather event the Folsom Street Fair. [7] For the 24th annual Folsom Street Fair, held September 30, 2007, the official poster artwork was a controversial photo featuring well-known LGBT and BDSM community members in festive and fetish attire including Roma "as players in an innovative version of the culturally iconographic" The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, complete with table draped with the Leather Pride flag and "cluttered with sex toys, whips, and various (BDSM) restraints". [8] The image by FredAlert [9] was used on the official event guide and produced as collector's posters that were displayed throughout the city as advertising for the event.
In 2003, Roma's drag act was incorporated into Ronnie Larsen's play Sleeping With Straight Men with Mink Stole in San Francisco. [10] [11] In 2006, Roma was nominated for Best Nonsexual Performance Gay Adult Video News (GAYVN) award for her portrayal of Mona Lott, the maid of Wet Palms, which is a ten-episode gay-porn soap opera series. [12] He also has performed at San Francisco's long-running drag show Trannyshack. [13] In 2012, Sister Roma was the sole community-elected grand marshal, serving with twelve other marshals appointed by the Pride Board of the San Francisco Pride Parade. [14] In 2014, Roma objected to Facebook's real-name policy after the site suspended multiple accounts belonging to LGBT entertainers, and was one of a group of San Francisco residents who met with Facebook representatives to discuss the policy. [15]
| Year | Award | Category | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | GayVN Awards | Best Nonsexual Performance (Wet Palms) [12] | Nominated |
| 2010 | GayVN Awards | Personality of the Year [16] | Won |
| 2012 | San Francisco Pride | Community Grand Marshal [14] | Won |
Leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities that involve leather garments, such as leather jackets, vests, boots, chaps, harnesses, or other items. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures. Many participants associate leather culture with BDSM practices and its many subcultures. For some, black leather clothing is an erotic fashion that expresses heightened masculinity or the appropriation of sexual power; love of motorcycles, motorcycle clubs and independence; and/or engagement in sexual kink or leather fetishism.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), also called Order of Perpetual Indulgence (OPI), is a charitable, protest, and street performance movement that uses drag and religious imagery to satirize issues of sex, gender, and morality and fundraise for charity. In 1979, a small group of gay men in San Francisco began wearing the attire of Catholic nuns in visible situations using camp to promote various social and political causes in the Castro District.
Patrick Califia, formerly also known as Pat Califia and by the last name Califia-Rice, is an American writer of non-fiction essays about sexuality and of erotic fiction and poetry. Califia is a bisexual trans man. Prior to transitioning, Califia identified as a lesbian and wrote for many years a sex advice column for the gay men's leather magazine Drummer. His writings explore sexuality and gender identity, and have included lesbian erotica and works about BDSM subculture. Califia is a member of the third-wave feminism movement.
The leather pride flag is a symbol of leather subculture as well as kink and fetish subcultures more broadly, including BDSM. The flag was designed by Tony DeBlase in 1989.
Folsom Street Fair (FSF) is an annual kink, leather subculture, and alternative sexuality street fair, held in September that concludes San Francisco's "Leather Pride Week". The Folsom Street Fair, sometimes referred to simply as "Folsom", takes place on the last Sunday in September, on Folsom Street between 8th and 13th Streets, in San Francisco's South of Market district.
The San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Celebration, usually known as San Francisco Pride, is a pride parade and festival held at the end of June most years in San Francisco, California, to celebrate the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.
Stefan Grygelko, best known by the name Heklina, was an American actor, drag queen, LGBT rights activist and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California. Born in the Minneapolis area, Grygelko's mother was Icelandic; he lived in the Nordic country for a period of three years in the 1980s, with the name "Heklina" being created after an Icelandic volcano, Hekla. Heklina founded the iconic San Francisco LGBT/drag nightclub and live show Trannyshack in 1996.
I think that drag queens are still the eunuch clown that's safe to laugh at. It's definitively not shocking anymore. So I don't know if America's really embraced it. The early 90s was when RuPaul [was becoming famous] and it was the first time any drag queen had mainstream exposure. I don't really see a drag queen breaking out like that [again].
Real Bad is the name of a fundraising party held annually in San Francisco, California immediately following the Folsom Street Fair. The party, which occurs on the last Sunday in September, has been in existence since 1989. It is thrown by a non-profit organization called Grass Roots Gay Rights West (GRGR/West). Most of the money raised by the event comes from ticket sales, which are generated by a network of party hosts who sell tickets to friends. Proceeds from the party go to HIV/AIDS charities and LGBT health and community service organizations. In 2007, the party raised $150,000 for San Francisco Bay Area charities.
Donna Sachet is the stage name of Kirk Reeves, an American drag actor, singer, community activist, and writer based in San Francisco.
Halloween in the Castro was an annual Halloween celebration held in The Castro district of San Francisco, first held in the 1940s as a neighborhood costume contest. By the late 1970s, it had shifted from a children's event to a gay pride celebration that continued to grow into a massive annual street party in the 2000s.
Kink.com is an independent San Francisco-based bondage internet pornography company that runs a group of websites devoted to BDSM and related fetishes. Kink.com, along with Kink Studios, LLC, Hogtied.com and Behindkink.com are DBAs for Cybernet Entertainment LLC, the parent company that operates the studio.
AEBN, short for Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, is an Internet pornography company that specializes in delivering material through streaming video in a video on demand format. Subsidiaries include PornoTube.
Michael Stabile III (1974) is an American journalist and documentary filmmaker best known for his work in and about the sex industry. He is the director of Seed Money, a documentary about pioneering gay porn producer Chuck Holmes, of Falcon Studios. Stabile's written work on sex and sexuality has appeared in Playboy, The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, and New York Times, among others.
The Grand Ducal Council of San Francisco, Inc., is a predominantly gay 501(c)(3) nonprofit fund raising organization. Formed in 1973 as a more camp-oriented response to San Francisco's Imperial Court System by H.L. Perry, who reigned as the Court's Grand Duchess I, the Grand Ducal Council raises money for a wide array of charity organizations through large annual costume balls and various other, smaller fund raisers throughout the year. Both the Imperial Court System and the Grand Ducal Council of San Francisco are built using roughly the same power structure. "Monarchs" are elected and the nonprofit, 501(c)(3) portion is run by a board of directors or trustees.
Jack Shamama is an American author, producer, screenwriter, blogger, and social critic who is best known for his work in the LGBT community and in gay pornography. Born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Miami, Florida, Shamama graduated from Wesleyan University and later moved to San Francisco, where he lives today. Since 2008, he has been the product manager for gay adult video-on-demand membership site Naked Sword, where he is concurrently producing the independent art-porn feature film, I Want Your Love.
Honey Mahogany is an American activist, politician, drag performer, and singer. She first came to national attention on the fifth season of RuPaul's Drag Race, followed by releasing her debut EP Honey Love. She was instrumental in setting up The Transgender District in San Francisco, where she served as the first director. In 2024, Mahogany was appointed director of the San Francisco Office of Transgender Initiatives.
BeBe Sweetbriar is the stage name of Kevin-Lee Junious, an American drag singer, actor, community activist, and host based in San Francisco, California. She has released two dance records, Save Me and Free to Be Me. BeBe is also host of multiple parties, such as Porno, a quarterly dance party and Play Trivia with BeBe at Harveys, San Francisco. She hosts a weekly webTV talk show, It's Everything, on the Talk Stream Network.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBTQ) community in San Francisco is one of the largest and most prominent LGBT communities in the United States, and is one of the most important in the history of American LGBT rights and activism alongside New York City. The city itself has been described as "the original 'gay-friendly city'". LGBT culture is also active within companies that are based in Silicon Valley, which is located within the southern San Francisco Bay Area.
Nikki Calma, better known as Tita Aida, is a social activist from San Francisco, California. She is a long-time advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness, particularly among Asian American communities, and for transgender people.
Esta Noche was the first Latino gay bar in San Francisco and notably contributed to queer Latin culture. It operated from 1979 to 2014, and was located at 3079 16th Street between Valencia Street and Mission Street in San Francisco, California.
Media related to Sister Roma at Wikimedia Commons